Ads, no ads, malicious, non malicious, it doesn’t matter for me. Discord has been around for a long time. It is too little too late. I don’t know why anyone who thinks critically about online privacy would feel trusting of Discord after all that has happened. I don’t have to use it, unless that changes, I won’t use it and I’ll avoid using it when it means missing out on things. This is the case with many online things because trust has been broken. Hopefully one day terrible applications will fail because people don’t want to support terrible projects. It is the same with terrible politicians who get re-elected after passing laws that ensure mass surveillance. Democratic countries around the world are filled with governments that represent their people with human rights violations and in some cases illegal harm directed at the people who vote for them. It is the same with hardware and software, as long as no one is willing to switch from invasive practices and forgive people for ongoing misdeeds, then it is of little use complaining about the shortcomings of the software, the politicians, or the system that we supported and created. Continuing to support while trying to hide from it is insanity. For me, this means avoiding poorly built things such as Discord without forgiveness because I am the customer.
I had a feeling that my post pointing out that a politician in a superpower state is campaigning against mass surveillance would be taken down, and it was. I thought that because it would be too uncomfortable for people who live there to consider anything along the lines of political action against mass surveillance. I have noticed while reading this forum that it is the same when it comes to privacy and software. There is more often a conversation about how to use something while only minimizing harm when options that are not harmful exist and people are quick to defend and quick to drop all skepticism when it comes to realities that no one even knows about because not only closed sourced software but black box politics that are employed.
You vote with your usage, your usage is dollars, even if you think you are stealing from big tech, your usage is clout and promotion.
Discord, for me, has failed. I won’t use it unless it is impossible to conduct business without it.
As for my post being deleted, I got a notice that said it was because of community guidelines and had a link to them. I did not see any guideline that was violated. This is the familiar thing that many privacy “proponents” complain about and I was right, that even on a privacy forum, talking about the politics of privacy in a way that is actually meaningful at a core level is not okay. I would list other politicians who I believe are already in office and already either positive or negative for privacy, but I do not want this to also be deleted.